Left Behind, UConn Ponders Starting Over Again

Jim Calhoun in 2011. His men’s basketball program won three national titles. Geno Auriemma’s women’s team has won seven.Credit
Jason Szenes for The New York Times

Connecticut is not eligible to play in the Big East men’s basketball tournament, which begins Tuesday, nor can it qualify for next week’s bigger national show. It would still be fitting for the Huskies to be at Madison Square Garden for the conference finale Saturday night, if only for the purpose of turning out the lights.

The party as we have known it is not only soon to be over, but Connecticut — the least desired of seven charter members to inaugurate the conference in 1979 — faces what could be a messy and muddled cleanup as the university left behind.

“Frankly, when the league formed, nobody really wanted Connecticut, nobody but Dave Gavitt,” said Mike Tranghese, who served 11 years under Gavitt, the founding commissioner, and for 19 more after succeeding him in that role. “Only Dave had an idea of what that school could become, but I don’t know if even he could have envisioned what they actually have done.

“In my 30 years, I’ve always considered what Connecticut accomplished, how far it came athletically and academically, to be the most significant individual thing. And now, in the end, they wind up a victim, in a way standing alone, and I don’t know if there is any rational explanation for it.”

As the gradual deconstruction of a proud conference occurred over the past decade and concluded in recent months with raids by the Atlantic Coast Conference and the announced mass departure of the so-called Catholic 7 basketball universities, Connecticut has become the most successful of athletic institutions left standing in a manipulative and almost diabolical game of musical conferences.

It’s not as if Connecticut wasn’t trying to find a way out of the as-yet-unnamed and soon-to-be former Big East, with three other holdovers combining with a seemingly ill-fitting cast of newcomers. But with three men’s national basketball championships and seven on the women’s side, and a football program no worse than some of the universities recently gone to the A.C.C. (Syracuse and Pittsburgh) and Big Ten (Rutgers), Connecticut is left to ponder an immediate future in an unheralded league and the likelihood of no traditional or natural geographic rivals.

Why the A.C.C. did not want Connecticut is a matter of conflicting speculation, though most of it lands at the feet of the former men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun.

One person who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject said that Boston College strenuously objected to Connecticut because Calhoun was critical of its 2003 departure from the Big East to the A.C.C. But another person said it was Connecticut’s consistently poor men’s basketball graduation rate and its recent N.C.A.A. recruiting violations that raised objections by A.C.C. power brokers.

Rutgers was accepted into the Big Ten last fall, with the widespread belief that the conference wanted a foothold in the New York metropolitan area. But while intending no disrespect to Rutgers, Tranghese said: “A lot of people don’t understand what makes New York tick. The two schools with the biggest impact in the New York market have been Syracuse and Connecticut.”

The Big Ten does prefer that its members be part of the Association of American Universities, an organization of leading research universities. But while Connecticut does not belong, and Rutgers does, Nebraska lost its membership after joining the Big Ten, which has also at times pursued another non-A.A.U. member, Notre Dame.

“I stopped guessing a long time ago why people make decisions about you,” said Susan Herbst, who has been Connecticut’s president since June 2011. “We are what we are, a top public research university with a commitment to great athletic programs across the board.”

She conceded that Connecticut’s new reality had created consternation on campus and in alumni circles.

“Honestly, it’s been a challenge for some of our fan base,” Herbst said in a telephone interview, adding that the fans worry the university will suffer in status and recruiting when the newly aligned conference moves forward with Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida, while adding members like East Carolina, Houston, Memphis, Southern Methodist, Central Florida, Temple and Tulane.

Her standard response to the team’s supporters, Herbst said, is to suggest they listen to what the Huskies’ coaches in basketball and football, along with the athletic director, Warde Manuel, have to say about the new conference.

In a recent interview, Coach Geno Auriemma pointed to how his program, the Connecticut women’s basketball team, which rose to national prominence in the 1990s, had lifted other Big East teams that had invested little in women’s basketball.

“Do we have to do that again?” he said. “That’s the kind of approach I want to take, as opposed to what we’re losing, how that affects us, and worrying that we’ll never have what we had.”

Manuel agreed that the new football alignment would be a work in progress, but no one was confusing the current Big East with the Southeastern Conference.

“Change brings concern, and rivalries take time,” he said.

Although the men’s basketball league will not come close to matching the current Big East powerhouse, Manuel said that with Memphis, Houston and Temple joining Connecticut and Cincinnati, it would be at least the equal of a new league that will feature the breakaway Catholic colleges and assorted add-ons. The Catholic 7 and their new partners, after negotiations and reparations, will take the Big East name and play their postseason tournament at the Garden.

As for the likes of East Carolina and Tulane, Manuel said: “I don’t think anyone’s coming into this conference thinking they’re not going to compete. I mean, look at the history of the Big East. We weren’t a very good program at the beginning.”

While Connecticut officials praise the academic reputation of a Tulane and the athletic pedigree of a Memphis, Manuel admitted that while the dust seems to have settled for now, who knows when a gust of wind will again rearrange the landscape.

“We feel settled in the new league, we’re moving forward, but if at some time someone wants to reach out to us, we’ll have that conversation,” he said.

Speculative translation: if the SEC should seek to expand its footprint to the Northeast, perhaps book a couple of its gridiron Goliaths into MetLife Stadium, Manuel and Connecticut would not play hard to get. If the Big 12 should raid the A.C.C. — as some have speculated it might — then he would keep a night light in the window to help the A.C.C. folks locate him in countrified Storrs.

In the meantime, Auriemma and Kevin Ollie, the first-year coach who succeeded Calhoun when he retired, will have to fire up recruits, along with the aforementioned fan base, without the benefit of regional passion plays against Syracuse, Providence, Villanova and Georgetown, unless they are willing to schedule out-of-conference games. Connecticut will have to play in a new conference tournament that does not have a site yet and may never have the panache of the annual gathering at the Garden.

“It’s unfortunate,” said the Miami Heat’s Ray Allen, a first-team all-American during his run (1993-96) at Connecticut. “A lot has been banked on what’s going on with the football schools. Where we are, Connecticut, we’re building a pretty strong football program, but the basketball program still stands above all. That’s what the Big East has stood for. I look at the traditional Big East — it’s still a basketball conference, and I’d like to see it stay that way. We have to stay true to our part of the country. Playing in big cities is where we belong.”

That school of thought had led some to hope that Connecticut would put basketball first, join with the Catholic 7 and find another home for its football team.

“When you add the football element, schools are going for bigger paydays,” Allen said. “It’s hard to say our school doesn’t want that football money.”

Whatever high road there might have been in big-time college sports has been washed away in a sea of television revenue, but Herbst insisted that Connecticut “has never been in it for the money — we’ve been in it to win.”

Just the same, Connecticut stands to earn a substantial cut of the $100 million pot of money that will be dispersed to the members of its new conference for relinquishing the Big East name, according to published reports.

That’s another reminder that the most rewarding victories in college sports are not necessarily recorded on the playing fields as much as they are in bargaining rooms. More than a buzzer-beater for the conference championship next season — wherever the new configuration winds up playing its tournament — count on Connecticut’s beleaguered fan base to be rooting for the next realignment shoe to drop sooner than later.

A version of this article appears in print on March 12, 2013, on page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Left Behind, Starting Over. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe